Fourteen-year-old Shafat Ahmad works as a domestic helper in the house of a Srinagar-based government employee in Kashmir. His younger sister embroiders shawls in an unregistered textile venture in her native village of Beeru. "When my father first brought me here, my employer promised to send me to school," Shafat told IPS. Though he is keen to pursue his education, he has yet to attend a single class. The Ahmed siblings' story...

-The Hindu   It speaks to the deeply divisive times we live in that Team Anna activist and Supreme Court lawyer Prashant Bhushan was savagely assaulted in his own chamber — and in the full glare of television cameras — for the “crime” of saying something that his attackers disapproved of. In the past, intolerant groups who seem to have no problem breaking the law with impunity, have targeted writers, artists, journalists,...

-The Hindu In many ways, Vachathi was a test case: not so much for the judiciary as for India's social conscience. In June 1992, this tribal hamlet in northern Tamil Nadu was witness to what brutal law enforcers and callous government officials could do to the poor and the powerless. Women were raped, men were assaulted, houses were looted and destroyed, and cattle were killed, all in the name of upholding...

Information Commissioner Shailesh Gandhi sold off his business in 2003 to do something relevant. The Indian Institute of Technology-Mumbai alumnus soon became a prolific user of the Right To Information Act and filed more than 800 RTI applications. He was appointed the Information Commissioner at the Central Information Commission, New Delhi, in 2008. In this freewheeling interview with rediff.com's Priyanka, Gandhi says that appellants must understand that law describes 'information' as something...

-PTI   The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), which is probing several high-profile corruption cases, had demanded only partial exemption from the ambit of the RTI Act as per its initial proposal but later pressed for a blanket cover which was approved by the government this year. The file notings provided by the Department of Personnel and Training, under RTI Act, show that in 2007, Committee of Secretaries had rejected the demand of...